


Three Stories, written by Gimli son of Glóin on occasion of his imminent passing

by Tessa Crabanen (tessacrowley)



Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Dwarf/Elf Relationship(s), I'm trying to make it feel as close to canon as possible after all, M/M, Retrospective, Schmoop, So I have to channel Tolkien and Write Too Hard(TM), Wordy overwritten schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-11
Updated: 2018-05-15
Packaged: 2019-05-05 07:51:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14613267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tessacrowley/pseuds/Tessa%20Crabanen
Summary: Gimli would not wish to die without committing to history three particular stories that he has long held secret.





	1. The First Story

_ There are three stories that I should like to commit to writing ere I leave this world forever, all of them intertwined. There was a time, and by Mahal it was not long ago, that I was convinced I would never dare utter them to any living soul, let alone inscribe them to be remembered for all of time, but old age has a way of blunting the blade that is fear of others’ judgment. Knowledge of my imminent passing from this world makes my fears about my legacy – about what stains may be left on my house, about what my kin might think of me – slip through my fingers like so much water. After all, what fear does one have of others when the only thing left to fear is death? _

_ To those who read these pages, my life might already be familiar. As a younger Dwarrow, I was one of the Nine, who rode out of Rivendell to take the One Ring into the mountain of fire. These stories are not about that journey, though they be contemporaneous. In any case, that journey has been documented more elegantly and in more detail by other hands. These stories are far more intimate. _

_ I am called Gimli, son of Glóin, of the House of Durin, called also Lockbearer and Elf Friend. Though none of my immediate family yet survive and though I am not married, there is one who still draws breath and who knows my true name, the one given to me in secret on occasion of my birth. He is the one these stories are about. In fact, he is my One. _

_ Famously, or perhaps infamously, I did not at first get very well along with Legolas, son of Thranduil, of the Eryn Lasgalen. Oil and water we were at the beginning – even when mixed, incapable of true cohesion. We were each of us guilty of biases and preconceptions, and of the cruelties that follow naturally with them. _

“Oh, Gimli,” Legolas sighed, setting the parchments down in his lap. “Must we begin with this? This is such a cruel start to a love story.”

“Aye,” he answered, and finally completed the long process of standing up from his desk chair, fighting his aging knees all the while. “Aye, my love, we must begin with this.”

“But why?” he asked, as Gimli came slowly over towards him, where he was perched neatly on the edge of the water, legs tucked beneath him. “I regret every indignity I put you through in those early days, you know that.”

“And you know that I regret mine,” he said. “But doesn’t the knowing of them make the inevitability of our love feel all the sweeter?”

Gimli moved to sit on a rock beside him. Legolas lifted his hand to help him to sit more easily; the moment he did, the hand lifted and stroked fondly at his hair.

“Perhaps,” Legolas conceded, reluctantly. “Still I mislike that you begin with it.”

“Then it is fortunate you need only read it once,” Gimli said, chuckling. “Speaking of which?”

Legolas sighed, and smiled, and turned his bright eyes back to the pages.

_ Elf and dwarf, after all, have not much been friends, at least not in the same age as we were, and histories long dead have a way of inflaming much more recent disagreements. More than once, I called him stubborn, and aloof, and thoughtless. More than once he called me foolish, and brash, and wild. I blamed him for the indignities his father put mine through; he blamed me for all his kind’s political woes. _

_ But by the time we made it to the gates of Moria, it had settled, mostly, into what was if nothing else an even and cool mutual disdain. And by the time we made it out— _

_ In hindsight I know that the death of the Gray Wizard was only a herald for the birth of the White. But at the time, I had just watched a man who I counted as friend face down a Balrog of Morgoth and die in the process, pulled into some unspeakable black hell. The hobbits were inconsolable. Boromir was stunned, staring wide-eyed out onto the vista that laid just beyond the bridge. I was shaking in my grief. And Legolas… _

_ Legolas, I recall looking confused. Confused, with a ghost of an anguish he didn’t seem to understand. _

_ I said that I had three stories I wished to tell. This is the first. _

_ He took first watch at the camp we made that first night after Gandalf had fallen. When I woke to relieve him, before I could say a word, I heard him whisper: _

_ “So he is truly gone.” _

_ I stopped in my approach, if only for a moment. I still did not like him, but under the circumstances, I felt there was some unspoken agreement of a cease-fire. _

_ “Aye, Master Elf,” I answered him after a moment. “It seems so.” _

_ “And this – this heaviness,” he said, looking over at me, “this weight in my heart, this is what they call grief.” _

_ It had never really occurred to me before, perhaps because I’d never had to think on it overlong, but grief would be a strange sensation to a deathless elf, wouldn’t it? Slowly, I sat down beside him. _

_ “I do not like it,” he said, voice thick. “How do you make it stop?” _

_ Something twisted in me. “You cannot make it stop, my lad.” _

_ Desperation shone in his eyes. “Does it never go away?” _

_ “Not when it meant something,” I said. “Not when it’s real. But it does get easier, in time. The weight is not always so heavy as it is now.” _

_ He dropped his eyes, rubbed a palm across his cheek. And Mahal help me, but I hurt for him as much as with him. This was a very harsh way for an immortal creature to learn the sting of death, and at that moment, I would have liked to spare him it. _

_ “Imagine me,” he said, laughing in that broken way that only comes from underneath mountains of grief, “taking advice from a dwarf.” _

_ “Imagine me,” I returned in kind, “giving it to an elf.” _

_ Then we laughed together, both still aching. The laugh was brief, and it was soft, but it was real. _

_ “You may take your rest now,” I said. “I have the next watch.” _

_ “I cannot sleep. Could not. Will not.” He lifted his eyes to the sky, at just the right angle that I could see starlight glinting off his bright, sapphire eyes. “I need the stars too much on this night. Will you—” _

_ He hesitated, then, but I waited. _

_ “Will you stay with me for a while?” he asked. “Grief seems a lighter burden in company.” _

_ “Aye, lad,” I said. “I’ll stay with you.” And I did. _

_ And something changed that night because of it. _

_ It was not something grand, not something that changed all in me instantaneously. It was small, and it was almost undetectable, like the first drop of water that shapes the stone. I was not so cruel to him any longer, nor was he to me. We spoke more kindly to one another, shouldering each other’s grief when one found the burden too heavy. _

_ And I began to notice things about him that I had never noticed before. _

_ I noticed the way he sang when he took up the rear-guard of our party, and for the first time I took the time to truly hear him. I noticed the way his face brightened when we came upon any copse of trees, and the way his fingers moved so deftly along his bowstring when hunting down our dinner. I noticed all these things, and though they had always been there to observe, for the very first time, I was starting to like them. _

Legolas was smiling down at the page, and Gimli was smiling at him.

Age had its claws deeply in Gimli these days, but of course had spared his elven love. Legolas was as perfect and fair as he had been the day Gimli first met him. Perhaps more so, with the new wisdoms in his eyes.

And though Gimli regretted with great bitterness that he would leave him, he could not hate him for it. He had loved Legolas too long and too well to resent him for anything he was, even if immortal was what he was.

“I forget sometimes how sentimental you are,” Legolas said, eyes lifting to Gimli’s. “You hide it so well.”

“An honored tradition of the House of Durin,” Gimli answered, and Legolas laughed. If Gimli could spend what few years he had left listening to only one sound, it would be his laugh, like clear water over stones.

_ In another world, perhaps, or another time, I would have seen it for what it was right away, of course. In the clarity of hindsight, it was so obvious, but years of learnings and decades of tradition and generations of harsh and unyielding social mores had trained me well. It would have been just as unthinkable at the time as it is obvious now that what I was doing was falling in love. _


	2. The Second Story

_Doing the thing and knowing it were two matters entirely separate, of course._

_I fell in love with that blasted elf over the course of at most a month. In my defense, falling in love with an elf is no hard thing to do – not even for a dwarf, once the guard comes down. Despite the rocky political history between our two races, none would deny the children of Ilúvatar are fair and lovely, and he especially smiled like sunlight and moved like wind through trees. In the early days he always surprised me with his—_

“Gimli!”

It was not often Gimli could get his love to blush so. He laughed long and well at the sudden color at the tips of his ears.

“You overdo yourself with this complimentary nonsense,” Legolas said, pushing the papers indignantly into his lap. “The hallowed annals of history will not care how well you loved my laughter.”

“Ach, _amrâlimê_ , this whole endeavor spawned from my dwindling regard for what the annals of history would care for!”

“Oh, it goes on for paragraphs,” Legolas moaned as his eyes ran down the page, as incapable as ever of taking a compliment, even from his lover of hundreds of years. “If you ever had any self-restraint, your old age has done away with it entirely.”

And Gimli kept laughing. He laughed harder and louder until it snagged halfway up his throat, and it turned into coughing. Then the coughing turned to hacking. Then Legolas was no longer looking at the pages.

“Gimli—” He rose, quick and deft, to the far side of the room, where a small jug of water was waiting on a tray. He poured a cup and returned to Gimli’s side, who thankfully took it from him, still coughing, and downed the contents in one long pull.

Legolas hovered anxiously by his side all the while, and when Gimli at last drew in a ragged but blessedly even breath, the tension in the room slowly deflated. The elf sank onto his knees in front of him.

“ _Meleth nîn,_ ” he said, and there was a fresh anxiety in his eyes from a very old fear, echoing conversations they have had so many times before.

“I’m all right, lad,” Gimli wheezed, “I’m all right.”

By his expression, Legolas did not believe him. “Was that prelude you wrote true?” he asked, voice soft. “Are you writing this because you…”

It was the elf’s turn to choke, though not from a coughing fit. He dropped his eyes, and even though Gimli’s heart broke every time this subject came up, every time there were new pieces to be found left to shatter.

“Keep reading, you ridiculous elf,” Gimli said, but if there was any effort at humor, it died somewhere in the back of his throat.

A shuddering sigh, then Legolas picked up the pages again.

_But the knowing. Ah, the knowing was a different matter entirely. I might have never known the depths of my own heart if it were not for our fateful visit to Lothlórien._

_This is where the second story takes place._

_The Lady of the Golden Wood, who some call witch, Galadriel, had powers that even her kin balk at – the power to see into the hearts and minds of all those before her and in her wood. And of course, she was famous for her beauty, and though I came into those woods fearful and even ripe for anger, seeing her washed it all away._

_Aye, she was beautiful. She was so beautiful that there was hardly a point in denying it. Her hair and skin glowed with light, her eyes shone, her face so perfect that it was as though her Maker had crafted it with his own hands! She was so beautiful that I did not have to pretend to anyone that she was not._

_And when she gave me her gift of three golden hairs from her head, which still I bear, she said to me, for all to hear: “I do not foretell, for all foretelling is now vain: on the one hand lies darkness, and on the other only hope. But if hope should not fail, then I say to you, Gimli son of Glóin, that your hands shall flow with gold, and yet over you gold shall have no dominion.”_

_After that, however, she gave me another message, that rang but in my mind, for it was only I who she would have hear it:_

_“But ask yourself – which gold would you have flowing in your hands? That which was mined from the earth? Cut from my head? Or from another’s?”_

_And for an instant, her unearthly eyes left me, and when, stomach knotted and heart thumping, I followed her gaze, we were both of us looking upon Legolas._

“Gimli…”

Legolas looked up at him again, eyes full of some emotion that neither could readily name.

“You have never told me thus,” he said.

“We dwarves like our secrets,” Gimli mumbled. “For many years it was a secret too precious for me to share, even with you. Precious and terrifying. How quickly and how thoroughly she knew me! When I did not even hardly know myself!”

The lines of the elf’s throat rolled as he swallowed. “Then she is the first and only of my kind to have seen us and conferred a blessing rather than a curse.”

Gimli bowed his head long and low. “Aye,” he said. “And all she had to do was see directly into my heart.”

There was a nervous energy trembling in Legolas’s fingertips. He rose up off the ground back to his knees. “Gimli, you tell me you are dying. And my love for you will follow me to the very ruin of Valinor, you know this.”

Dread knotted in Gimli’s stomach. “Legolas—”

“So how could I find any comfort in the Undying Lands? How could I find comfort anywhere without you?”

“Stop, I beg you,” he said. He was desperate to avoid this pain, for it had broken him so many times before.

“You told me once you would have me sail, before the end of your days – to follow the gulls to the Gray Havens, but I tell you I will not! I cannot!” Tears threatened to break the banks of his eyes. “You cannot ask me to do this! I will not go where you cannot follow!”

“I would not have you linger here and waste away to your grief!” Gimli said, but all strength he tried to muster dissolved into the same sadness in Legolas.

“And I would not have you die alone!”

“Lord Legolas? Master Dwarf?”

Old habits resurfaced in an instant, even through the emotion. Legolas turned away to hide his tears from the servant who’d just arrived – with a tray of food for supper, no doubt – and Gimli took a hard breath in to steady his voice:

“Thank you, lass,” he said, keeping his gaze away, on the stream that cut through the room on one side. “You may leave it on the table.”

Soft elven feet crunched quietly on the loamy soil. A near-imperceptible sound of wood on wood. Then a hasty exit punctuated by a closing door.

“Legolas,” Gimli began, but Legolas picked up the stack of papers, his back still to Gimli, and read on.

_Wise she was, and more perceptive than I ever could have been. At the time, I knew instantly the meaning of her words, but could not truly understand them. My hands, flowing with the gold of Legolas’s hair? A man to love a man was unthinkable enough – but a dwarf to love an elf? Impossible._

_Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?_

_Those last few days in Lórien were torturous. And as we left, in some frenzied combination of terror and and the weight of her parting words to me, I spoke of her, constantly, rapturously, because of her I_ could _speak in such a way._

_“Henceforth I shall call nothing fair lest it be her gift to me! Three hairs from her golden head! A more lovely creature never shall I see again! A shining gem amongst rough, a ray of light in darkness!”_

_And Legolas smiled, lighthearted and ignorant in a way I blackly envied, knowing not that every word I was saying was not about Galadriel._

Gimli sat still upon the stone by the creek, food still untouched. He had lost his appetite.

Behind him, a sob hitched in Legolas’s throat.


	3. The Third Story

_So I had fallen in love with an elf, against all the unspoken rules of our Makers and kin, and soon I did not even have my own ignorance to hide behind. A sensible observer may ask, how long before something gave?_

_The answer, it turned out, was not very long at all, at least not when measured against the lives of dwarves and elves. In my defense, we were on a very dangerous quest, and it was only a month or so before the choice became telling him now or never telling him at all._

_The third and final story takes place at Helms Deep, at the Battle of the Hornburg._

“Will you not sit, my One? I doubt I could finish both meals on my own.”

Legolas still hovered at the edge of the water, back to the door. A gust of cold air came hissing through the trees, sending his unbound hair twisting across his back. He was upset, Gimli knew – after a hundred years together, he could read everything about his love better than the rock and stone from which Mahal had hewn him – but the pair of them had always had good enough sense to know how and at whom to be upset.

He turned a moment later, walking slowly to the small table in the center of the room. Gimli had already situated himself at one of the chairs. Elven chairs became more difficult with age, he found.

“Helms Deep,” Legolas said, setting the papers down on the edge of the table, away a bit from the food.

“There could be no other story to finish,” Gimli said, and even though they’d both sat down ostensibly to eat, neither touched the food.

“I agree,” Legolas said. His voice was wan, eyes downcast. “And yet in my heart I would wish it held jealously. That memory ought be ours alone.”

Gimli searched his face carefully. “You need but ask and I would burn the pages.”

A beat of silence. Legolas plucked a piece of honeycomb from his plate and broke it in half between his fingers. “No,” he said. “If we are both to die, then the memory itself should live on, somehow.”

“You shall not die,” Gimli said. He tried to sound firm, but even to his own ears, it was more sad than curt.

“Even if I sailed to the Undying Lands, I would die upon the ocean for grief of leaving you behind,” he answered, voice too neutral for words so cruel. “And my soul would sink beneath the waves.”

Gimli swallowed hard down the sorrow in his throat. “Sentimental elf,” he said. “Do not speak so. If you bear any love for me at all, you would live on for my sake if not your own.”

“My life is yours,” Legolas said. “My joy is yours. My sorrow is yours. Everything I am cannot exist without you. And if this displeases you, then you should not have loved an elf, for we know no other way to love but with everything in us.”

Gimli reached across the table for his hand. Aging, wizened fingers clasped with slender, fair ones.

“You know I would do anything for you,” Gimli whispered. “Even live forever. But I do not have that power, _amrâlimê_.”

It was how the conversation always ended. Slowly, and painfully, on either side of the unscalable wall of mortality.

They ate, unhappily, and Legolas read on.

_Dwarves are stubborn creatures, and if not for the abrupt and very real possibility that one or both of us might die, I might have been able to carry my feelings clenched in the pit of my stomach for all my years. But I saw the black hoards of Uruk-hai stomping down the valley; I heard their bestial rallying cries and smelled foulness as it snarled up the Deeping Wall. And I knew, I knew, that there were far too many of them, and odds were slim that any of us would last the night._

_“Legolas,” I said, through my teeth, as we together stared into the endless armies of Saruman, stomping and roaring in the darkening rain._

_“My friend,” he answered at once, and looked down. His golden hair was drenched bronze, but his eyes still shone with fierceness, and I loved him all the more for it._

_“I would have you know,” I said, stumbling over my words, for despite rehearsing them in my head, the saying was so much harder, “I would have you know the depth of my affection for you.”_

_“Aye,” Legolas said at once. “It is a better thing to die side-by-side with a friend.”_

_“And an honor to die beside one’s love.”_

_I caught his attention, if nothing else._

_He stared down at me as though I’d caught fire._

_“I’d have you know,” I said again, “that in the time I have come to know you, earn your trust and your friendship, that you have also earned my admiration and my love. I’d have you know that you surprise me, constantly, with your vigor and your skill and your kindness and your loyalty. I’d have you know I love you, deeply and well, and that I would never be parted from you if the choice were mine.”_

_The Uruk war drums thundered through the darkness, but Legolas looked at me as though he could not hear them. The silence became more unbearable with every second._

_“I don’t,” he said, but stopped. He tried again with “You can’t,” and “That’s not,” but all his words tripped and fell from his tongue. I knew this terror in his eyes. It was the same terror that ate through my heart in Lothlórien, that gnawed at the edges of my mind all the way through the Riddermark. It should not be possible, but it was. It was not decent, but shame did not change it._

_“You need not answer,” I said, though my heart of hearts wished he would. I looked forward at our doom, screaming and drumming and roaring in Black Speech. “I have said my piece. Try not to die, laddie.”_

_And then the battle began._

“I was shaken,” Legolas recalled. The meal was mostly eaten, the sun mostly set. Gimli had set about to the task of undressing, slowly, in his now-doddering way, for bed. “Disgusted. I’d learned so much about dwarves – and unlearned much more – and you especially had earned so much of my respect and admiration. But still, it was disgust I felt at first.”

Gimli grunted by way of answer. Legolas, still seated at the table, tipped back in his chair, the papers in his lap, and stared up at the ceiling.

“And horror. And revulsion. The world had trained it into me for thousands of years, with all it said of love… and did not say.”

“You unlearned it quick enough,” Gimli pointed out, kicking off his shoes.

“Aye, and harshly.”

_They won’t tell you this in the writings of the Battle of the Hornburg, but I very nearly died in it._

_Perhaps it was some existential despair that had settled in me when I saw my love’s revulsion to my confession – perhaps it made me fight too hard and too rashly, for what was the value of a life without love?_

_Or perhaps it was the ten-thousand orcs._

_Either way, the details escape me. The last thing I remember is carving my way through a pack of ten Uruk-hai. There was a great clanging noise in my skull, and then darkness._

_And then, and then, and then… there was song._

_Beautiful song. Tragic song. A lament so clear and wrenching and hitched with broken sobbing that, even as it pulled me up from unconsciousness, made my soul ache with empathy for the singer. I could not hear the words, though I could name them as Elvish, and the singer… the voice was familiar somehow._

_As my vision cleared, marginally, and I became aware of three things beyond the singing, in the following order:_

_First, the stench. All around me, the smell of death and orc blood saturated the air like a vile fog._

_Second, a weight and heat on my chest, too light to be an orc, too warm to be a corpse, and shuddering where it lay._

_Third, golden hair, spilling down across my neck and jaw._

_It was then I knew the singer._

_“Legolas—” It was all I could manage, before coughing and spitting blood._

_The singing stopped immediately. I could see him clearly now, as I came to. He lifted his golden head, and his sapphire eyes, running with tears, fell wide in shock._

_“Gimli – Gimli!” He came scrambling up my body, desperate and inelegant. “Ai, Elbereth, cuiol!” Hands on my face, warm and soft and so, so welcome. “You live, I thought – I thought—”_

_His hands left me a moment later. He turned and screamed for a healer. I could barely hear an answering call – we must have been quite far from anyone, let alone a healer._

_A moment later he returned to my field of vision, and it could have been the head wound, but I would have sworn he was glowing like the sun itself before my eyes, so radiantly beautiful, even as tears ran down his face._

_“I thought you dead,” he sobbed, voice small and broken._

_My head was screaming in pain, but even so, I said, “We dwarves are made of… stronger stuff than that.”_

_He laughed deliriously, though still he cried. His hands came back to my face, and if I’d had the strength I’d have wiped his tears away._

_“Forgive my weeping,” he said, breathing but harshly as he held onto me, body wracked with sobs, his long fingers tangling in my blood-matted hair. “I had to learn so quickly and so harshly all that you meant to me, only by having you snatched away! Gimli, Gimli, ai, meleth nîn, forgive me!”_

_He kissed me, then, though I was bloodied and battered, with such desperation and fervor that it stole my breath more easily than any orc’s blow. And I resolved not to let this wound kill me, for if it did, I would never feel such bliss a second time._

Gimli was sitting on the bed, silent, shoulders hunched.

Legolas was still at the table, and turned finally to the last page.

“You do not include the night after the battle,” he said.

“I would share your kiss with history, but your body I would keep all my own,” Gimli answered.

Legolas turned in his chair. His mouth was smiling, but his eyes were yet lined with depthless elven sorrow.

“No?” he said. “You would not tell of the night when, desperate in my love and near-loss of you, I came to your bedside in dead of night, straddled your hips, and made a marriage bed of a healing cot?”

Gimli smoldered, low in his belly. Legolas stood.

“Nor would you mention the nights in Fangorn, where with the Entwash sweeping past our legs, I screamed your name into the skies as you had me?”

Gimli rumbled, deep in the back of his throat. “Legolas,” he said.

Legolas stood, the papers held loosely in one hand. A slight cant of his head, a shift of his robes, and the transformation from prince to nymph was staggering. “Or in Erebor,” he said, “where I stole into your room in dead of night like a thief, and as you pulled my hair—”

“Legolas,” Gimli said again, more loudly, “I’m no spring chicken anymore. And the last time this happened I nearly threw out my damned back—”

“Then _this_ time,” Legolas interjected, “let _me_ do the work, you stubborn dwarf,” and climbed onto the bed above him. “Do not make my heart ache for you and then deny me.”

It would be well after nightfall when Legolas would read the final page.

_If this love be sin, then I struggle to name virtue._

_At every turn, we have been met by disbelief or outright disgust. It would be eighty odd years before we would even try to tell our own families that we had found love, and even then to near-ruin of both. There is nothing about us that decent folk should approve of, we have learned, and no place where we may love without fear._

_And it is my considered opinion that it is not the love that is wrong. It is you._

_You who made us fear and hide. You who made death itself the only catalyst for something as simple and good as love. You who told us that there could not, must not, will not be love between two men, between dwarf and elf, between the Greenwood and the Mountain. You are wrong. The world is wrong. It should be said when it is true._

_So I have written these stories to spite you, at worst, though at best they may learn you. I am Gimli, son of Glóin, and I have loved and been loved well and long by Legolas Thranduilion, and if I could do it all over again, the only thing I would do differently is love him sooner and better._

_I hope these stories serve a grander purpose, now that we’re free to tell them. And if they don’t, if they are deemed heretical and burned, I hope the one burning them spends the rest of their life doubting themselves._

_I will not repent for sins I did not wreak and I will not apologize for harm I did not bring. With what life Mahal gives me, I will be with my One. To hell with the rest of you._

_Spitefully,  
_ _Gimli Glóinul_

Cold night had settled around the Eryn Lasgalen, but the bed was warm. Legolas at long last set the stack of papers down on the table next to him, then rolled over and regarded his love, half asleep and bundled in fine elven sheets.

He traced a finger along and through the white beard, heart surging.

“Come with me,” he said.

Gimli grunted in a way that Legolas knew meant he’d rather be sleeping than talking. But Legolas wanted to talk.

“Gimli,” he said, louder. “Come with me.”

“Where, _amrâlimê_?”

“To Valinor.”

Gimli opened his eyes at once. “What?”

“Come with me to Valinor,” Legolas said again.

Silence for a turn, then Gimli sat up on his elbows, sheets dropping away from his bare chest.

“Dwarves cannot go to the Havens,” he said.

“By my reckoning,” Legolas answered, “anyone who can go on a boat can go the Havens.”

Only a handful of times in their life together had Legolas truly stunned him into silence.

“That…” he began, faltering. “It cannot be.”

“Neither can we be, by all accounts,” Legolas answered. He leaned forward and kissed the corner of his mouth. Against Gimli’s skin, he whispered, “But to hell with all of them.”

**Author's Note:**

> Aaaaw. The Angst Bus got off at Happy Ending. ヽ༼ຈ ل ຈ༽ﾉ
> 
> Thanks for reading! Comment if you liked it, etc etc.
> 
> [twitter](http://twitter.com/tessacordelia/) | [tumblr](http://tessacrowley.tumblr.com/) | [website](http://tessacrowley.com/)


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